Hi Agenda,
I'm responding only to the thread title you started. It's great to
know you're making real efforts on improving your image, a quality
not many of us are capable of.
Like the rest of my peers, we usually wind up complaining about
discomforts in life over cups of teh tarik on Sunday evenings
before returning to our old lives for the better or worse of what
it has to offer.
A little over a year ago, my father was diagnosed with terminal
liver cancer and given 6 months to live. That being said, I've
never been close to my mother and elder sister, I spent the most
part of my juvenile delinquent days dropping in and out of
polytechnics, eventually landing myself odd jobs at the occasional
pub and cafe in my late teens. He was an old man making 3 bucks an
hour at fast food restaurants. And she as well. My sister left home
to be with a boyfriend. While I continued drifting in and out of
jobs with no stable income. I relied on my parents for money, food,
even cigarettes and I was already 22.
I checked the only person I ever loved into the A & E by myself
2 hours past midnight. They reeled him out the ambulance and I was
told he would die in 6 months. I stayed home for 3 months feeling
very broke, very jobless, very young, very uneducated, extremely
lost and very hopeless because seeing him wither and thinning from
the dying made life very bleak for a 22 year old back in those
days. Try chopping pills from a dirty blade for a dying man with 2
bucks in your pocket and a heap of bills to pay with a clueless
mother and non existent sister around for support and I call it the
lowest point of my life. I contemplated suicide but even at 22, I
was too damn proud to kill myself.
So he died a Tuesday morning alone on his bed because I was the
only one else around and at 22, I was far too young and too afraid
to look at a 40kg father gasping for his last breath and till now,
I regret never having held his hand to see him through his last
moments. I filed the death report alone. Called for casket alone.
Called HDB by myself. And arranged for the wake by myself. We had
many great laughs many mornings before the moment he died and
afterwards nothing else really matters.
Life turned around afterwards with projects coming in and more
opportunities to furnish my work with more skills, more money to be
made, more backpacking travels and I've fallen into rapids several
times almost drowning during heavier storms. During times when I
fall into the water, I would remember my father and kin and of the
simpler days when all worries were limited to a zit on my arse or
whether the boy in the next class gave a damn about me in the
canteen.
Perhaps his passing hasn't really changed much of me. Just writing
about it makes me feel a little better now and wishing the years
ain't passed.